Norman Edgar Hubert was born at Rosehill, Billingshurst, West Sussex on 1 June 1906. He was the son of William Arthur Hubert and Gertrude Louisa Williams. His father was a doctor and Hubert was the second of three boys and one girl. Much of his early life was spent in Clevedon, Somerset.  He studied art at the Reading School of Art, before attending the Slade School of Art under the redoubtable Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer in the period 1926-29. Hubert’s contemporaries at the Slade would include: Elinor Bellingham Smith, Tommy Carr, William Coldstream, Anthony Devas, Gabriel Lopez, Nicolette Macnamara, Rodrigo Moynihan, Claude Rogers, William Townsend and Geoffrey Tibble. Hubert’s early work was in the figurative style typical of Slade students at that time. ‘Objective Abstraction’ was the term applied to the work of a group of British artists in the 1930s. Objective Abstraction was a non-geometric form of abstract art in which the painting evolved in an improvisatory way from freely applied brushstrokes. It was part of the general ferment of exploration of abstraction in Britain in the early 1930s and was short-lived. The term was coined after the exhibition ‘Objective Abstractions’ was held at the Zwemmer Gallery, London, in March to April 1934. Seven painters participated in the show: Rodrigo Moynihan, Geoffrey Tibble, Graham Bell, Victor Pasmore, Ceri Richards, Tommy Carr and Ivon Hitchens.  Although William Coldstream and Hubert were members of the group, they did not produce any work for the show. Despite sharing the group’s left-wing politics, when the others returned to figurative art, Hubert continued to work in both abstract and semi-figurative styles. His wartime paintings consisted of post-Cubist figures in ambiguous spaces and abstractions of geometrical linear patterns over subtly coloured grounds. They reveal his appreciation of Surrealism and geometric abstraction and, though always distinctive, might variously be compared to the work of Paul Klee, Jankel Adler, Ben Nicholson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Ill-health forced Hubert to return from London to the family home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire in the late 1930s and ensured his exemption from call-up during the Second World War. He showed occasionally with the London Group in the period 1931-47. The deaths of his father and two brothers between 1936 and 1947 affected him deeply and he remained at the family home until his mother died in c.1960. Hubert then moved to Seaford on the Sussex coast, where he led a reclusive existence until his death. The later work he produced would be darker, more complex and include more organic forms. These, combined with geometric linear patterns, characterised a body of work produced from the 1940s to the late 1950s which were purely black and white. During that period, he also displayed a looser, more complex manner that related to much abstract painting of the time. Hubert was included in group exhibitions at the Lefevre Galleries (1942), the London Gallery and the Anglo-French Art Centre (1946) and at the Mayor Gallery (1948 and 1953). He had two one-man exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery in 1946 and 1948 and the influential critic Lawrence Alloway persuaded him to show in the ICA’s ‘Forty Years of Modern Art’ (1948). Hubert’s work was shown twice in Paris: in the British Council’s La Jeune Peinture en Grande Bretagne (1948) and at the Salon des des Réalités Nouvelles of 1949. His work also appeared in the ‘Exhibition of Modern British Paintings 1942-47’ organised by the British Council and toured to Prague, Marseilles, Paris, Rome and Athens. Hubert’s artistic career was severely hindered by his chronic shyness and upon the death of Geoffrey Tibble in 1952, he would appear to have lost all contact with the world of art. He nevertheless continued to paint, returning at the end of the 1950s to an all-over style that recalled his work of the 1930s. Edgar Hubert died in obscurity at Seaford on 25 January 1985. Representative examples of his work may be found in the collections of the Tate and the British Council. In April 2005 the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street, London sold an ‘entire collection of hitherto unseen paintings by the reclusive abstract artist Edgar Hubert, who died in 1985, sold out on opening day. Prices for Hubert’s work, for which there are no auction records, ranged from £750 to £8,500.’